Child Welfare Law - News
Posted Saturday, September 22, 2001 byLittlebird
The Globe and Mail, Monday, May 28, 2001

Child-welfare law blamed for whisking natives south The Globe and Mail, Monday, May 28, 2001


Aboriginal children from reserves deep in the northern wilderness are being shipped thousands of kilometres away from home to foster care in the foreign territory of urbanized Southern Ontario.

The number of native children being plucked from troubled families under Ontario's strict new child-welfare law is soaring, and aboriginal children's aid societies in the North have run out of beds in foster homes -- native or otherwise -- for the abused and neglected youngsters.

While there has always been a shortage of foster homes for native children across Canada, it is the first time in a generation that aboriginal children are being whisked out of reserves ravaged by poverty and addiction and flown south to foster homes a world away from their extended families and culture.

"I can't imagine having an 11- or 12-year-old child of mine shipped off to a community like ours, where we don't even have a native band in the area," said Bob Pickens, executive-director of the Leeds and Grenville Family and Children's Services in Brockville.

Four adolescents from the isolated fly-in reserves dotting the muskeg shoreline of James Bay were flown down to a privately run group home in Brockville -- a town on the banks of the St. Lawrence River near the Quebec border -- from the Payukotayno children's aid society in Moosonee a few months ago when no homes could be found anywhere closer.

"You can't go any further south than Leeds and Grenville, and you can't go any further north than Payukotayno. We're a long way away. It's anything but an ideal solution."

Fifteen years after Ontario opened the first native-run child-welfare agency in the North to stop the heart-rending removal of children from the only culture they know, the system is breaking down.

New child-welfare legislation proclaimed a year ago -- drafted on the heels of inquests into the brutal deaths of a handful of Southern Ontario children -- has lowered the bar for scooping children into care. Neglect now ranks as a grounds for seizing children. And the very thrust of the legislation was altered to make child protection paramount, ahead of the preservation of the family.

The number of children that social workers are pulling into foster care has exploded across Ontario -- indeed, across Canada, as child-welfare laws also shift in other provinces. Nowhere is this trend more apparent than in the native reserves of the North, where abject poverty, housing shortages, domestic violence and addiction leave children living in squalour.

In Ontario alone, 5,300 more children are in foster care than five years ago -- a jump of 53 per cent. In the dire shortage of foster homes that has followed, even big agencies such as the Children's Aid Society of Toronto are shipping children to homes outside the city.

But none are sending their children nearly as far afield as are the native agencies in the North. And no other agencies are contending with the culture shock of parachuting already careworn children accustomed to shacks and dirt roads into the urban, white-dominated climate of Southern Ontario.

For native communities, their removal to the South marks an uneasy step backward to a bleak era known as the Sixties Scoop, when overzealous social workers plucked thousands of children from Canadian reserves and placed them for adoption with non-aboriginal families across Canada, the United States, and as far away as Europe.

"That's the reason we went to the government and told them we wanted our own CAS, because we didn't want our children to be taken south of Moosonee. But it's happening anyway," said Gerald Mattinas, a long-time band councillor at the Attawapiskat First Nation on James Bay.

The aboriginal children's aid societies -- whose social workers came from the reserves where they worked -- were supposed to end the era of native children landing in non-native foster homes.

For years, Payukotayno social workers would remove at most 40 children a year from the half-dozen reserves along the James Bay shoreline, and only the most serious cases in need of professional treatment would be shipped outside the district. Now, roughly 100 children remain in the agency's care, and about 20 of those are hundreds of kilometres away in Southern Ontario group homes, with all links broken to the reserve to which they will ultimately return.

"With the child-welfare reform, a lot more children have ended up coming into care, so we have even more children to place. And that's what's put us over the edge," said Marge Matheson, executive director with Payukotayno.

"We've been reeling for the past year. We literally exploded a little over a year ago. We've just been coping with the crisis."

But native child-welfare workers say the problem is less a shortage of foster homes in the North than it is generations of aching poverty and overcrowding in flimsy, barely insulated houses that have bred a culture where the abuse and neglect of children are rampant.

At Tikinagan Child and Family Services -- a native children's aid society based in Sioux Lookout that covers a massive territory across one-third the map of Ontario -- all but three of its 32 reserves can be reached only by plane.

The reserves are mired in poverty, with 59 per cent of the population collecting less than $10,000 in income a year, and prices for food and gasoline at least double what shoppers pay in Toronto stores. Few houses are connected to water, hydro or sewage.

Suicide rates among children and youth are almost three times the national average. Among the remote reserves in Tikinagan's catchment, more than 100 young people have committed suicide in the past five years alone, with an estimated further 14 attempts for every child who does die.

"When I was up there, I found it absolutely incomprehensible that there was that level of Third World conditions in Ontario, and people in Southern Ontario don't know about it," said Moe Brubacher, executive director of the Wellington Family and Children's Services in Kitchener, who did a short stint as head of Tikinagan last year.

"There are some healthy communities. But there are some communities where, from a child-protection point of view, you could easily find every child in the community at risk." Of a population of 200,000 people, there are about 150 children in the custody of the Wellington agency. In Tikinagan, where 20,000 people live in scattered, far-flung reserves, more than twice as many children remain in care.

At the same time, Ontario's child-welfare law militates against recruiting native foster homes in the North. With two and three families crowded into small houses heated only by wood stoves, few people on reserve are eligible as foster parents under a child-welfare law that holds to the Southern Ontario standard of children in care having their own bedrooms.

For many, it boils down to a child-welfare system plucking too many children from homes where there is promise for rehabilitation. "Why should I take a kid from way up North and put him in a southern community? Is that in his best interest?" asks Michael Hardy, Tikinagan's executive director.

"Well, that's our belief right now. The legislation has not been developed in child welfare to support the family. So you see more and more kids being shipped out of communities."

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